And she is a de facto adjutant to her father, Eddie, a bag man, one whose “job was to pass greetings, or good wishes, between union men and other men who were their friends. Even in the early opening section, set in late December 1934, Anna, then eleven, is already working, though her labor is unpaid: At home she assists her mother, Agnes, a onetime dancer at the Ziegfeld Follies now doing piecework, by adding sequins to lavish hats. The bulk of Manhattan Beach, which is divided into eight parts, tracks Anna starting at age nineteen, when she is employed at the Navy Yard to measure and inspect minuscule parts for battleships (“nothing she handled was larger than a quarter”), work that she has begun to despise.

That Pulitzer Prize–winning book, as Egan explained in an interview with Heidi Julavits that ran in the summer 2010 issue of BOMB, emerged while she was trying to get started on what would become Manhattan Beach, which she referred to in this colloquy as “my goddamn Brooklyn Navy Yard book.” Manhattan Beach originated in 2004 during a fellowship Egan had at the New York Public Library as she told Julavits, “I got interested in the fact that thousands of women worked at the Navy Yard during World War II, often doing traditionally male jobs like welding and pipe fitting.”

Manhattan Beach is a fleet, sinuous epic, abounding with evocative details, felicitous metaphors, and crystalline historical assessments.Įgan’s latest novel might be the most traditionally structured she has ever written-it is certainly more so than A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Manhattan Beach’s immediate predecessor, a work fluid in time, point of view (first, second, and third person are deployed), and even genre. And though the era that Egan explores- Manhattan Beach opens in 1934 and ends a decade later-stands among the most chronicled, and while several of her characters, like Dexter, may seem at first to be recognizable noir types, she brilliantly reinvigorates familiar conventions. Manhattan Beach is a rarely depicted patch of Kings County, among the most excavated locations in contemporary literature and film. “It’s near Coney Island but cleaner, private,” says Dexter Styles, an underworld kingpin and resident of the neighborhood, to Anna Kerrigan, a young woman working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. (It was for me.) Despite the name, Manhattan Beach is not in Manhattan. The littoral locale that provides the title for Jennifer Egan’s excellent fifth novel may be difficult for even longtime New York City dwellers to fix in their minds geographically.

Manhattan beach novel review